Reminders to Self

Respect your body, you were almost paralyzed.

What you put in your mouth matters. Stop drinking so much. A glass of wine with dinner is fine. Dirty martinis taste better in moderation. Quality over quantity.

Stop smoking. People love you. Cancer isn’t fun (plus it runs in your family). You will shrivel up and die. Suck a dick instead.

Portion control. Binge-eating is fun, but cardio sure isn’t. Balanced diet, go easy on the carbs. If the Miss Vickies’ burning a hole in your mouth, you’ve had too much.

Never too old to learn. Read more. Worry less.

Never too smart to listen. Every punchline needs a pause to breathe. Don’t be afraid of the silence. 

Don’t be a talker. Be a do-er.

A fractured spine and a fractured ego

June 11, 2020

Five weeks ago, I got into a little accident (an understatement). I had spent the week leading up to Mother’s day in White Rock with my parents. I figured that while the world was still on lockdown during this pandemic, I would enjoy some peace and quiet away from the city, try to spend some quality time with my family, and enjoy some home-cooked meals. But while my guard was down, the suburban tranquility stabbed me in the back. 

During this quarantine, I had gotten very good at jogging. I was consistently jogging every other day, and tracking them religiously on my phone to motivate myself. On May 7th, a sunny Thursday, I decided that I would continue to honour this routine and try for a 10-km (it would have been the longest run yet). Feeling confident and properly amped up, I departed. Then, about ten minutes into my run, as if someone had taken a club to the back of my head, I collapsed onto the sidewalk pavement and let out a loud scream. Only it was not really a scream but closer to a loud grunt. “Uggghhhhh!,” I released, and then I was unconscious.

For a moment, it felt like I had just woken up from a nap, and it took me another second before I realized where I was. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a car pull over to my side of the sidewalk. It was a woman who got out, and with haste, she approached and asked if I was okay. “Not really,” I replied with what little air I had left in me. I tried to get up even though I knew I shouldn’t. If only I could just get up and walk this off, I thought to myself. She saw that I was trying get up, and with a panic and nervousness in her voice, she quickly told me not to move, and that an ambulance had been called and was on its way. At that moment, I knew whatever happened to me was pretty serious. My body felt cold even though I could feel the sun beaming down on me. My upper body felt stiff, but through the tension, I could just barely turn my head and see a puddle of blood. She explained that a tree had fallen and hit me on the head. I lay there wishing this bad dream would end, and I would wake up and blame the whole thing on another weed-induced nightmare. But this was not a bad trip.

Has anyone done a statistical analysis on tree-based accidents? I cannot imagine getting hit by a dead tree being a common occurrence, and probably even less likely for it to happen to someone who is jogging. Me, a moving target, was struck by a usually stationary tree on a sunny day with very little wind. Had I purchased a lottery ticket that day, I would have won the jackpot. What were the chances? It should be noted that I was raised Christian. I was taught at a young age the concept of Heaven and Hell, and that if I did bad things, I would face consequences: the Good Lord would punish me, by form of lightning or something similar. For a full year growing up, I was convinced that I would go blind from masturbating. Obviously, I took that risk, and since then I have used my still-intact vision to view countless more pornographic films. As a homosexual, I grew out of my fear of God, and now I only go to church for weddings with an open bar afterwards.

On an average day, I am a stubborn atheist, not a preachy one, but maybe a cynical one. The only thing I confidently believe in is the entropy and natural decay/disorder that occurs within the human race. However, this was not an average day, and as I spent that day and the next several days in that same horizontal position, I could not help but think about the possibility of a God. Not the possibility of devoting myself to one, just that He/She might exist, and whether or not they would be laughing at me in that moment. Or maybe that tree was a punishment for the myriad of sins I’ve committed in my life. Sometimes I pee in the shower and I don’t call my parents as often as I should, but did it mean that I deserved getting hit in the head by a dead tree? Was this my version of getting struck by lightning? My head was filled with irrational thoughts, and I would replay the past weeks thinking of possible actions I may have done to warrant this not-so-divine intervention. 

The ambulance arrived, after a little while. They told me they were getting me to the Royal Columbian Hospital in New Westminister for a CT Scan. They put a brace around my very fragile neck, then clamped either side of my body and placed me on a stretcher. “On a scale of 1 to 10, how much pain are you feeling right now?,” one of the paramedics asked me, which became a question that I would keep hearing for the next week. A brick-shitting fucking 12, I thought to myself. “Like an eight?,” I responded politely. “Are you allergic to any medication? We’re going to give you some Fentanyl, okay?” asked the paramedic. “Oh, fentanyl? That sounds dangerous, are you sure that’s necessary?” I said out of obligation, but secretly, I was excited at the prospects of getting high without having to work for it. I just wanted the pain to disappear. Which it did, the pain vanished as if it had never been there. That’s some good shit.

When I arrived at the hospital, a team of three or four nurses rushed over to my stretcher and started asking me a series of questions regarding my pain levels and sensitivities. All I knew at the time was that there was a gash on top of my head, and that my arms felt strangely numb. An intense tingling sensation ran up and down my limbs, and I was afraid to move a single muscle without being told to do so. Eventually, I was wheeled in to get my CT scan done. Horizontal, and unable to move, I got accustomed to staring at the ceiling. Counting the spots on the grey and monotonous ceiling boards became the only entertainment I had. That hobby, though, got tiresome when I got wheeled into the scanning room, and I saw the ceiling art they had installed above me.  It was a worm’s-eye view (view from below, I Google’d it, it’s a thing) of assorted foliage: a clear blue sky decorated with the tops of some obnoxiously green trees that taunted me. Too soon?

Side note: I watched Shutter Island the other night, and there was an entire scene of Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo dodging falling trees in a storm.

Different people from different departments came and spoke to me, and I would give the same statements over and over again. First, it was a police officer who looked lost. I wasn’t sure why the police would be involved in this incident, and from the look of his face, he wasn’t sure either. “Yeah, I don’t really know what happened. I was jogging and then apparently a tree fell on me.” Then it was a nurse who had reviewed my scan and wanted to check in on my pain. “I know. Super bizarre. I was jogging and then a tree fell on my head, I think.” Then it was another nurse coming to put a catheter in (yes, it is as uncomfortable as you think it is). “I really should’ve bought a lottery ticket today, eh? Yeah, I was jogging and a tree just came out of nowhere!” Eventually, I mastered delivering that line, and I knew how to employ the correct inflections in my tone to get a laugh every time. “I know, so crazy, right? So, the moral of the story is (I’d pause here for half a second).. Don’t jog! (guaranteed laughter for at least one full minute).” To be fair, my audience was a team of healthcare workers during a pandemic, the bar was low. 

Eventually, a guy who said he was the head of the spinal department at the hospital came over to speak to me. He said that I had fractured my C-5 vertebrae in my neck and would mostly mean that I would need to go under the knife. He continued to tell me that the hospital I was at was not equipped to perform this surgery on me (comforting!) and that he was on the phone with Vancouver General Hospital and their best neuro- and orthopaedic surgeon to see if I could be transferred. Overwhelmed with information, I had nothing to say in response. The whole thing seemed so surreal, I was still hoping to be in a nightmare at this point. The next thing I knew, they were stapling my head shut (oh yeah, my head was still split open this entire time) and wheeling me out into another ambulance. 

When I got to Vancouver General, I had to explain what had happened to me to a new set of people. New nurses and doctors came over and explained more or less the same things I had heard already. Because of Covid-19, I was all alone in the ER. A pair of doctors from the spinal ward came over to speak to me in medical jargon that I only sort of understood, and performed some assessments to test my arm and leg strength. “Okay, push on my hand. Okay, now pull. Okay now lift up your knee,” they would instruct me through this same test every hour or so. They switched me to a higher dosage of morphine at this point, so I just stared blankly while they talked at me. Sparknotes version: My neck was broken, and I urgently needed surgery. 

The surgery happened at noon the next day. Obviously, I was overtaken with nerves. (Not literally, my nerves were shot from the accident.) The team of doctors had warned me that the surgical risks, though small, could potentially be permanent damage to my vocal cords and the mobility in my arms and neck. Even in that moment, as I was about to be wheeled into the operating room, I was still in disbelief that they were going to perform surgery on my spine. If it was not for that fact that I had not eaten for over 36 hours at that point, I would have shit myself. Instead, I stifled the anxiety like I have been trained to do my entire adult life, and I put on a brave face. Well, as brave of a face as the neck brace would allow for. Right before I went under anesthesia, I said to the team of surgeons and nurses in the room, “We’re going to have a great time today guys!” A final burst of desperation in hopes that it would sway the surgery towards the direction of success. 

The surgery lasted over eight hours. My neck was swollen the size of a basketball when I came out of it, and I gasped for air as I struggled to breathe. They installed a metal cage in place of my fractured C-5 and it holds together the rest of my spine. Luckily, the surgery went as well as it could have gone, though it did not feel that way. They gave me my own button to press for Dilaudid, which I abused like a X-Box controller. I spent the next five days recovering in the hospital, taking half steps towards normalcy, which felt foreign to me after spending 48 hours being immobile. First, I tried standing up on my own again as the anesthesia gradually wore off. Then, after they removed the catheter and allowed for me to eat again, I had to learn to piss and shit again on my own, for a lack of better verbs. I had a two-inch incision on the front of my neck, and a four-inch vertical one on the back of my neck, apparently one hole wasn’t enough to get the job done. With the state of my neck, it was hard to swallow, but the vile tray of garbage they called food at the hospital did not help. Figuring out how to sleep proved to be a difficult task, thankfully I was provided with a platter full of medication.

That was almost five weeks ago, my accident. I am now recovering in White Rock, back at the scene of the crime under the care of my loving parents. The entire ordeal was so traumatizing for them, the both of them have been treating me like an infant. When I first got home from the hospital, I was miserable—the trauma had finally sank in. I cried and felt enraged. I still have days when I feel an immense desire to set an entire forest on fire (I won’t because I love the environment despite how it betrayed me). Then after the fury subsides, I would cry and listen to Nina Simone and James Blake, and I would sob melodramatically. I keep thinking about that day, and what would have happened if I left the house just two minutes later, or ran faster, or if I had chosen a different route. I am furious that up until that point, I was a healthy person, and an innocent tree completely disrupted that. I am livid that from this point on, my neck is held together by a piece of metal and four screws, and I probably won’t be able to participate in a mosh pit ever again. I am constantly oscillating between feeling angry that something so unlucky happened to me and feeling grateful that luckily this is the extent of my injury.

The truth is, I was quite lucky. I found out later that on the day of my accident, I had been lying there for over an hour before I was found. With an impact to the head like mine, I was lucky to not have bled to death or suffered a brain bleed. I was also fortunate that the spinal injury or the surgery itself did not cause me to be paralyzed. I am grateful I have my parents who are willing and able to support me through this, and that this happened during a lockdown because the government is currently paying for my bills while I wait to go back to work. With a little physiotherapy, I should be able to return to my life in a couple of months. On a rainy day, my neck might feel sore, and I probably won’t be able to go on American Ninja Warrior, but in the grand scheme of things, this is okay.

I used to read about accidents like mine in the news and think, “thank god that’s not me,” and then it happened to me. Since then, I have been hypersensitive and aware of all the accidents on the news (particularly ones involving trees), and each one that I read feels like a punch in the gut. I don’t believe that “everything happens for a reason.” What kind of bullshit karmic force would decide that I needed to be struck by a tree that day? Sometimes bad things happen to bad people, and sometimes bad things happen to good people. Sometimes bad things just happen and they keep on happening, and there doesn’t need to be any explanation for it. I can rebrand it and be grateful that I got an extra six weeks to spend with my family, or say that this accident made me realize that I have been taking my health and mobility for granted, but that is simply my brain trying to rationalize this very unreasonable thing that happened to me. That is what humans do—we want to attribute chaos to the universe sending some kind of message, but the universe just exists.

Li HueYi, Our Matriarch

My grandmother was a particular woman. Even in her nineties, she wanted new furniture for her apartment. “The colour of that couch is too outdated,” she would say. Most ninety-year-old grandmothers hold on to things forever, especially their couches. But not mine. I remember we would go for lunch with the whole family, and if we had picked the wrong dim sum place she would give us the silent treatment. That is, of course, until we made it up to her by taking her to the coffee shop she liked for afternoon tea. She had an expensive taste and she made sure that we all knew it.

My grandmother was a loud woman. Howling into her karaoke microphone like she is headlining her own rock and roll concert. “One more time,” she would say after performing one of her legendary solos. Nobody asked for an encore performance and nobody needed to. My Po-po was a rockstar and she decided when the show would be over. How bad ass is that? As the matriarch of the family, her voice was always heard. “Family” was the song she sang, and she sang it with pride, beautifully and loudly. Her voice always brought us together.

My grandmother was a lavish woman, and more importantly, an extremely generous woman. If you know my family or have been to one of our gatherings, you would know that dinner with us is not just a meal. Every dinner she hosted was like Babette’s Feast. There would always be enough leftovers to sustain our family for weeks.  Nothing made her happier than to have the entire family crammed into her apartment so she could force feed each and every single one of us. My memories of Chinese New Years at Po-po’s are my fondest. When I was younger, I loved to watch her cook and not just because she was a master chef, but because she cooked with such ardor and enthusiasm. She would then lay out dish after dish onto the dining room table, each of them glistening with her love. Generations of her children would then come over and feast with her, and that would always put a smile on her face. Year after year this has never changed, we all gathered for the same reason–our love for my grandmother.

I am the man that I am today because of Po-po. When I go to karaoke nights with my friends, I howl into the mic just like my grandmother did, full of passion and love for music. My friends ask me for recommendations on restaurants because like my grandmother, I, too, have an expensive taste. Like my grandmother, dining out means more than just eating another meal, it is an opportunity for gathering and we should always cherish the people we have around us. When I go to art galleries, I think of my grandmother painting with her pastel crayons in her room. She was always focused and attentive to every detail being laid out on the canvas. When you look at her works of art you can see the love she had for life. Po-po taught me how to celebrate life, and how to live with passion and be grateful for the things that I have.

My grandmother was an incredible, amazing, loving, kind, beautiful, and passionate woman. I am devastated that she is gone, but I am so grateful for the time that I had with her. I am so proud to have been raised by such a strong woman who saw the beauty in life. I can only hope that I live the rest of my life the way she would have wanted me to.

Po-po, I love you.